Have Businesses Embraced Twitter Analytics Yet?

With the news that Twitter is focusing on revenue in 2009, we shouldn’t be so surprised to hear CEO Evan Williams embracing the now-undeniable corporate presence on Twitter as a potential revenue stream. If you remember, Craig’s List followed a similar model years ago, charging for job postings and little else. One thing is certain. For businesses to wholly embrace Twitter, they will need robust analytics that they can rely on to track marketing effectiveness and ROI. Let’s talk about two ways that businesses can use the data generated by Twitter to help their marketing campaigns.

Clickthrough
One of the great things about ecommmerce is the ready availability of analytics. Analytics make it easier for marketers to track conversions, for their ad spend, their email marketing, whatever. For Twitter to be a truly useful tool for marketers - and this goes for almost all mobile marketing as well - Twitter needs to get it some cool analytics. Pronto.

Sure, there is plenty of curiosity data available. Like tweetVolume, a kind of Istobe TweetStats), that breaks down your Twitter usage. But these have already been documented in an Istobe blog post - Twitter Analytics - by the irrepressible Tyler Frieling, a true Twitter acolyte.

The real point here is to point out that these analytics tools don’t do the one thing that is needed by marketers: track the performance of a campaign on an individual by individual basis. What’s needed is an old-fashioned Tweet cookie? Companies such as Tweetburner and Twurl are a start. They handle tracking for the shortened URLs so necessary for the 140-character limitation of Twitter. But they do it on an aggregated basis. It’s the individual level analytics that needs to be just a bit better productized, especially when the Twitter user is mobile.

Profile Building
Probably my favorite post recently about businesses on Twitter is from the Concepts Marketing blog by MarketRMan. In “Nordstrom is Following Me on Twitter, but does Nordstrom Know Why,” he derides Nordstrom for following him and says, “Nordstrom should try to find out more about me as a person. What are my need and wants? What would make want to become a Nordstrom customer? Why should I become a Nordstrom customer?…I don’t need an email from Twitter telling me that Nordstrom is following me. I need Nordstrom to do some homework, find out more about me and contact me on its own.”

Hey MarketRMan, I’ll tell you why they’re following you. Because Nordstrom is an exceptional database marketing company and knows enough to collect information now and figure out how to use it later. That homework you’re talking about? Yeah. That is what they’re doing. Every time you tweet, you’re giving them information about yourself. Information Nordstrom will eventually use to determine your needs and wants (i.e., what would make you want to become a Nordstrom customer). Get ready to have your tweets text-mined.

The Rub

Twitter is here but the analytics aren’t there quite yet. A lot of this has to do with the multi-channel nature of Twitter (web and mobile). And some of it has to do with the immaturity of the channel. And businesses will want to tweet long before they do because of this.

Tags: Clickthrough, text mining, twitter analytics, twitter marketing

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.